Colorado Territory (1949)

After breaking out of jail, an outlaw (Joel McCrea) is prodded by a dying friend (Basil Ruysdael) into doing one last job, a train heist, that will set them up for the rest of their lives. He reluctantly agrees. A rare remake that equals the original, director Raoul Walsh has taken his 1941 gangster film HIGH SIERRA and reinvented it as a western and it works out marvelously. Made the same year as Walsh's WHITE HEAT, it shares the same pessimistic fatality as the Cagney film. McCrea's character wants to put his past behind him and start a new life but he's caught in a web that has to be played out till its bitter conclusion and, unlike HIGH SIERRA, his fate is shared by the woman (Virginia Mayo in a lovely performance) he loves. Walsh's direction is energetic and the New Mexico and Arizona locales are handsomely shot in B&W by Sidney Hickox (THE BIG SLEEP). The score is by David Buttolph who would also score the second remake of the film in 1955, I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES, which wasn't directed by Walsh. With Dorothy Malone as the selfish and dissatisfied girl that McCrea plans on marrying, Henry Hull, John Archer, the dancer James Mitchell in a dramatic role, Morris Ankrum, Ian Wolfe and Maudie Prickett.